Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,266 96,211 80.67% 427

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 5192 6188 15 2035
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3874 4433 19 580
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3867 4607 6 1833
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3619 5019 11 2629
26 Anchorage - Huffman 3575 4311 10 1855
21 West Anchorage 3562 4327 12 1786
27 Anchorage - Basher 3452 4110 10 1489
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 3403 4041 13 1463
31 Homer/South Kenai 3252 4172 8 53
25 Anchorage - Abbott 3180 3846 12 1690
34 Mendenhall Valley 3075 4071 15 4225
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2956 3689 27 1751
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2915 3735 5 1811
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2809 3398 15 1261
04 Western Fairbanks 2799 3504 10 2419
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2557 3272 8 52
17 Anchorage - University 2551 3134 7 1418
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2475 3031 13 2127
23 Anchorage - Taku 2456 3018 13 1379
29 North Kenai 2409 3044 11 53
30 Kenai/Soldotna 2259 2780 13 29
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 2255 2659 8 432
11 Greater Palmer 2190 2688 15 3303
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 2178 2711 8 1952
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 2135 2573 19 1559
10 Rural Mat-Su 2121 2771 10 2006
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 2043 2407 6 567
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1808 2236 11 2213
07 Greater Wasilla 1773 2274 9 3407
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1767 2351 4 37
15 Elmendorf 1745 2208 14 724
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1725 2142 13 1506
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1703 2167 6 791
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1694 2202 19 10
03 North Pole/Badger 1388 1692 7 1204
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1240 1493 6 938
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 913 1191 10 81
38 Lower Kuskokwim 485 653 2 45
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 387 524 3 476
40 Arctic 378 540 4 40
99 NA 46 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.